What they said at the time
59 quotations from 1904 to 1921: Hale's letter, Todd's history, the architects and painters, the commissioners of the nations at war, and the people who walked the courts at night. Each one links to where it is read in the film or to the place it describes.
Heard in the film (30)
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.
Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, 1921
In coloring a vast city of this kind, I treated it as I would a canvas for a picture. The first tonal value was the travertine, and on this travertine the other colors were applied; always having in mind the strong light of California, and keeping colors well toned down and mellow.
Jules Guérin, letter quoted in Todd, 1921
As the palaces rose from the ground, making a magnificent walled city, they looked solid and they looked old and they had distinct character.
John D. Barry, The City of Domes, 1915
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
They have been bringing them to me in barrels.
William Howard Taft, January 1911
One feels too much the stacking up of story after story … very much as a boy sets up blocks of diminishing size, one on top of the other, until he can go no further because there are no smaller blocks.
Eugen Neuhaus, The Art of the Exposition, 1915, on the Tower of Jewels
Summing up my general impression, I find that the keynote of a Fine Arts Palace should be that of sadness modified by the feeling that beauty has a soothing influence.
Bernard R. Maybeck, Palace of Fine Arts and Lagoon, 1915
In getting the Exposition from paper to reality, they had succeeded in making it seem to be the expression of one mind.
John D. Barry, The City of Domes, 1915
Previous exposition buildings have, in the main, been used as a background on which to display lamps.… Its particular disadvantage is that it suppresses the architecture which becomes secondary.
W. D’Arcy Ryan, General Electric Review, June 1915
When the 54 searchlights were turned on the Tower and the flickering ‘novagems’ caught the beams, splintered them into millions of colored lances and dartled them all over the grounds and the nearby heights of the city, the effect was at once dazzling and delicate beyond all power to describe.
Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, 1921
There were thirteen thousand persons who submitted names, but the honor came to a colored school girl, little Miss Virginia Stephens, for being the first to suggest the name Jewel City.
Delilah L. Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California, 1919
I have to-night seen the greatest revelation of beauty that was ever seen on the earth.… the courts and buildings of the Panama-Pacific Exposition illuminated at night.
Edwin Markham, February 15, 1915, quoted in Todd
Of all the nations at war, it is France that comes to us, with this palace as a symbol that the world is not permanently split apart.
Chester H. Rowell, at the French Pavilion, April 9, 1915
It took a diver from the ‘Oregon’ nearly half an hour to find the wreck and fasten to it, and when it was hauled from the water its nervy pilot was still strapped in his place. The great crowd that had rushed to the scene stood silent, and men bared their heads.
Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, 1921
By day he left long festoons and loops and figures-of-eight high in air from smoke pots at the tips of his vans, and at night the places of these smoke pots were taken by magnesium flares with which he went trailing double lines of fire in the most erratic paths through the velvet sky.
Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, 1921
Such knowledge is not contained in books, nor taught in schools. It can only be learned in expositions; for expositions, and they alone, assemble it, classify it, and organize it.
Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, 1921
And then I saw the Incubator, the babies, the triplets! I held them. Yes, and hugged them, too, and oh, the little one, it tried to hug me.
Helen Keller, Chicago Examiner, April 8, 1915
We know that you will use your influence to see that this amendment is passed at this gathering of Congress, so that the women of the nation may know at whose door to lay their gratitude.
Sara Bard Field to the National Democratic Committee, December 1915
The Woman’s Board began its Exposition work without plans, without knowledge, with only an undefined desire to aid and serve…. It must confess its own surprise at the bigness of the responsibilities it has undertaken and borne to fulfilment.
Anna Pratt Simpson, Problems Women Solved, 1915
…it had well-equipped rest rooms; it secured employment for thousands, opened a nursery.
Anna Pratt Simpson on the Y.W.C.A., Problems Women Solved, 1915
If that tree grows as most redwoods grow, I am a fixture.
William Howard Taft, September 1915
…the long, gangling, white-haired man with the Lincolnian smile, accepted with a silent bow and promptly gave to his wife, who was sitting near.
Frank Morton Todd, on Edison receiving his medal, 1921
The Fillmore Street entrance, with the Zone shrieking at you at one side, hardly puts you in the mood for the beauty in the courts.
John D. Barry, The City of Domes, 1915
And yet there were a dozen nudes in the Palace of Fine Arts by some of the greatest modern painters, that could have been seen for nothing. Let anyone explain it that can; after all the explanations are in, it will be a mystery still.
Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. II, 1921
The moment it was billed to open at the McDonough theater of Oakland Mr. Butler called a public mass meeting, at which resolutions were passed condemning this race-hating, mischief-making film.
Delilah L. Beasley, The Negro Trail Blazers of California, 1919
How hard people studied those blue and purple fields of slashed wall-paper, and how earnestly they strove to decipher cabalistic portents from such sculptural abstractions as ‘Muscles in Motion’! They read books about the matter, and discussed it in paper-clubs, and were mentally aroused, excited, and rejuvenated.
Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, 1921
They say that blood is thicker than water, but I wish to say that Belgian gratitude is thicker even than blood. And to California particularly we are indebted. Herbert Hoover, whose name is blessed above all by eight million Belgians, comes from California.
Francis Drion, Commissioner General for Belgium, November 27, 1915
Friends, the Exposition is finished. The lights are going out.
Charles C. Moore, December 4, 1915
We see domes like the Canopy, a profusion of green domes. We see towers, red and golden in the sun, on which angels poise…. We see the noblest forms in which matter can be molded … rising from a reedy lake and doubled, for bounty, in its depths.
Frank Morton Todd, the Epilogue, 1921
The exhibits pass away within the recollection of a child twelve or fifteen years old. The physical picture is dissipated when that child becomes an adult or dies.
Frederick J. V. Skiff, November 1911, in Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. I, 1921
About the places (29)
A cloister enclosing nothing, a colonnade without a roof, stairs that ended nowhere, a fane with a lonely votary kneeling at a dying flame.
Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 2, ch. LVIII (1921)
The Palace and Lagoon he thought of and treated throughout as parts of one composition; neither one wholly effective without the other.
Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 2, ch. LVIII (1921)
Its dominant glass dome that seemed always floating like a bubble about to burst, and a lot of little domes and half-domes gathered about it.
Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 2, ch. LVI (1921)
Its main entrance is from the west, through the great Half Dome of Philosophy, which is 113 feet in height.
Official Guide of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (1915)
Then it loomed through the mist a legendary and incredible thing, brought back from the world of Titans; the work of spirits instead of men.
Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 2, ch. LV (1921)
The gulls wheel and scream about the Column of Progress.
Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 2, ch. L (1921), written about 1920 when it still stood
It was the sort of place in which it seemed always to be a fine day.
Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 2, ch. LVII (1921)
Beyond this palace, westward, one reached the Court of Flowers, a fairy place, like some incredible dream.
Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 2, ch. LI (1921)
The South Garden, the most pretentious of all the gardens, is laid out in the pattern of a formal French garden, surrounded by a low balustrade, with pools, fountains and vases of various designs to lend accent.
Official Guide of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (1915)
The Indian Prince, the Mongolian Warrior, the Arab Sheik on his camel, and their attendants and supporters … bowed to their fate but held to their positions until nearly on the ground.
Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 5, ch. XXXVII (1921), on the demolition of May 1916
The Marina. Impossible to describe or to photograph, and not for anybody to paint except Turner, who is dead.
Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 2, ch. L (1921)
The Yacht Harbor, with the Scintillator pier as a breakwater, is a permanent addition to the water-front facilities at this point.
Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 5, ch. XXXVIII (1921)
Had anyone been looking this way from Mars he must have thought somebody had at least struck a match.
Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 2, ch. LXIII (1921)
The State buildings were disposed in two ranks, one facing the Esplanade, the other the Marina. Across the Esplanade, southward, were the Pavilions of the Nations. Between these two ranks ran the Avenue of States.
Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 3, pp. 309-310 (1921)
Here you heard the murmur of little streams and the gurgling of cascades. At a certain spot you felt the illusion that this fairy region extended to the Presidio hills.
Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 3, p. 210 (1921)
In every line and angle and opening the structure was eloquent of the north, that Scandinavian environment where nature gives man fair battle always, and where, age after age, only the strong survive.
Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 3, p. 217 (1921)
It was the ‘shop window of the Commonwealth,’ crowded with proofs of vast and virgin resources.
Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 3, p. 249 (1921)
It did more than represent Italy. It was Italy.
Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 3, p. 263 (1921)
Probably it was the only thing ever seen in California that would give a real Californian the most fleeting unfaithful desire to live somewhere else.
Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 3, p. 294 (1921)
There were car axles tied into true-love knots as though they had been green rattan, and six-inch-section round and square bars bent into hairpins; all without a visible crack.
Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 3, p. 301 (1921)
Junipero Serra, father of the California Missions, stood in a canopied niche, looking down into the Forbidden Garden.
Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 2, p. 322 (1921)
It was a Parthenon with the bark on; for it is architectural tradition that long before the age of Pericles, the original Parthenon was a wooden structure…
Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 3, p. 331 (1921)
The flag of the Union waved from a staff in the hollow square, and looked as though it thoroughly belonged there.
Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 3, p. 334 (1921)
A human tide poured all day through a loggia of tall double columns between two gabled structures of red brick just westward of the New York Building. This was the shrine of the Liberty Bell…
Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 3, p. 338 (1921)
The very quaintness of its colonial architecture took you out of the atmosphere of the year 1915, and translated you into the time and place of the Revolution.
Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 3, p. 354 (1921)
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)
As the spectators sat in comfortable chairs and passed the various points of interest, they held telephone receivers to their ears, and heard lectures from phonograph records which were switched on and off to correspond with the various sections of the journey.
Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 2, p. 150 (1921)
Paris had its Eiffel Tower and Chicago had its Ferris Wheel, but the Zone at San Francisco had something that combined a little of both, and in some ways was more interesting than either.
Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 2, p. 151 (1921)
“Have you seen Stella?” was a popular formula, and she was the only feature of the Zone, as far as the writer remembers, that became the subject of a stage gag.
Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 2, p. 375 (1921)
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