The Jewel City

Motive and Planning of the Exposition

The Panama Canal a landmark in human progress-Its influence through changes in trade routes San Francisco determines, in spite of the great fire, to celebrate its completion-Millions pledged in two hours- Congressional approval won-The Exposition built by California and San Francisco, without National aid-Only two years given to construction- Fifty millions expended.

Human endeavor has supplied no nobler motive for public rejoicing than the union of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The Panama Canal has stirred and enlarged the imaginations of men as no other task has done, however enormous the conception, however huge the work. The Canal is one of the few achievements which may properly be called epoch-making. Its building is of such signal and far reaching importance that it marks a point in history from which succeeding years and later progress will be counted. It is so variously significant that the future alone can determine the ways in which it will touch and modify the life of mankind.

First of all, of course, its intent is commercial. Experts have already estimated its influence on the traffic routes. But these experts, who can, from known present conditions, work out the changes that will take place, that are already taking place, in the flow of commerce on the seven seas, cannot estimate the effect those changes will have on the life of the people who inhabit their shores. Changes in trade routes have overwhelmed empires and raised up new nations, have nourished civilizations and brought others to decay. From the days when merchants first followed the caravan routes, nothing has so modified the history of nations as the course of the roads by which commerce moved. Huge as was the Canal as a physical undertaking alone, it is not less stupendous in the vision of the effects which will flow from it.

In this vision, the Western shore of the United States feels that it looms largely. No small part of the benefits of the Canal are expected to fall to the Pacific States. Long before it was completed, the minds of men in the West were filled with it. Its approaching completion appealed to everyone as an event of such tremendous significance as to deserve commemoration. Thus when R. B. Hale, in 1904, first proposed that the opening of the waterway should be marked by an international exposition in San Francisco, he merely gave expression to the thought of the whole West.

The Canal is a national undertaking, built by the labor and money of an entire people. It is of international significance, too, for its benefits are world-wide. The Exposition thus represents not only the United States but also the world in its effort to honor this achievement. San Francisco and California have merely staged the spectacle, in which the world participates.

An international exposition is a symbol of world progress. This one is so complete in its significance, so inclusive of all the best that man has done, that it is something more than a memorial of another event. It is itself epochal, as is the enterprise it commemorates. It bears a direct relation to the Canal. The motive of the Exposition was the grandeur of a great labor. Completed, it embodies that motive in the highest expression of art.

It took eleven years to prepare for and build the Exposition. The first proposal in 1904 was followed by five years of discussion of ways and means. Two years were occupied in raising the money and winning the consent of the Nation, and then four years more in planning, building, and collecting the exhibits. The first plans were interrupted, but not ended, by the most terrible disaster that ever befell a great city-the fire of 1906, which wiped out the entire business portion, with much of the residence section, of San Francisco, and destroyed hundreds of millions of wealth. Before that year ended, and while the city was only beginning its huge task of rebuilding, it again took up its festival idea. A company was formed, but, until reconstruction was largely out of the way, it was impossible to do more than keep the idea alive.

In October, 1909, the idea began to crystallize into a definite purpose. In that month President Taft, at a banquet at the Fairmont Hotel, declared that the Canal would be opened to commerce on January 1, 1915. That announcement gave the final impulse to the growing determination. The success of the Portola celebration that summer had given the city confidence in its ability to carry out a great festival undertaking. In fact, it was at a meeting of the Portola committee that the first move was made toward the organization that later became effective.

A mass-meeting in the Merchants' Exchange, on December 7, 1909, ended in a resolve to organize an exposition company. This found such strong popular support that at a second mass-meeting on April 28, 1910, $4,089,000 was subscribed in less than two hours. In two months the subscription had risen to $6,156,840. Governor Gillett called the California legislature in special session in August to submit to the people constitutional changes enabling San Francisco to issue exposition bonds in the amount of $5,000,000, and the State to raise another $5,000,000 by special tax. In November the people of State and city voted the two amounts. That placed a minimum of $16,000,000 to the credit of the Exposition Company and assured the world that California meant business.

Then followed the struggle for Congressional approval. New Orleans demanded the right to celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal. All the resources of both cities were enlisted in a battle before Congress that drew the attention of the Nation. Three times delegations went from California to Washington to fight for the Exposition. California won, on January 31, 1911, when, by a vote of 188 to 159, the House of Representatives designated San Francisco as the city in which the Panama-Pacific International Exposition should be held in 1915 to commemorate the opening of the Canal.

During this struggle California gave her word that she would not ask the Nation for help in financing the Exposition. The promise has been kept. The Government has not even erected a national building. It has, however, helped in material ways, by granting the use of portions of the Presidio and Fort Mason reservations, by sending naval colliers to bring exhibits from European countries, and by becoming one of the heaviest exhibitors. The national exhibits include three companies of marines encamped on the grounds, and the battleship Oregon anchored off the Marina.

After Congress had acted, half a year was spent in choosing a site. It was at first expected that the Exposition would be built in Golden Gate Park. A compromise among advocates of different sites was reached on July 25, 1911, when a majority vote of the directors named a site including portions of Golden Gate Park, Lincoln Park, the Presidio, and Harbor View. Before 100,000 people President Taft broke ground for the Exposition in the Stadium of Golden Gate Park. But it was not long before the choice settled finally on Harbor View alone.

The work began with the organization of the architectural staff. The following architects accepted places on the commission: McKim, Mead and White, Henry Bacon, and Thomas Hastings of New York; Robert Farquhar of Los Angeles; and Louis Christian Mullgardt, George W. Kelham, Willis Polk, William B. Faville, Clarence R. Ward, and Arthur Brown of San Francisco. To their number was later added Bernard R. Maybeck of San Francisco, who designed the Palace of Fine Arts, while Edward H. Bennett, an associate of Burnham, of Chicago, made the final ground plan of the Exposition group. When San Francisco had been before Congress asking national endorsement for the Exposition here, the plans which were then presented, and on which the fight was won, were prepared by Ernest Coxhead, architect, of this city. These proposed a massed grouping of the Exposition structures, around courts, and on the Bay front. They were afterwards amplified by Coxhead, and furnished the keynote of the scheme finally carried out. While the Exposition belongs not to California alone, but to the whole world, it is pleasant to find that so much of what is best in it is the work of Californians and San Franciscans.

The architects perfected the plan in 1912. At the same time the actual work of preparing the site was completed with the filling of the tide-land portions by hydraulic dredgers and the removal of the standing buildings. In the same year the department chiefs were named and began their work. John McLaren, for many years Superintendent of Golden Gate Park, was put in charge of the landscape engineering; W. D'A. Ryan was chosen to plan the illumination, and Jules Guerin and K. T. F. Bitter were placed at the heads of the departments of color and sculpture. With these details behind, the ground-breaking for Machinery Palace in January, 1913, marked the beginning of the final stage. In the two years that remained it was necessary only to carry out the plans already perfected. No other exposition has been so forehanded. When the gates opened on February 20, 1915, to remain open till December 4, the Exposition was practically complete. Some of the exhibitors had not finished their installation; some of the foreign nations were not ready, but the Exposition had kept a promise made two years before to have its own work done on time. This achievement was quite unprecedented. It is the more remarkable in that the record was made by a city which had been almost annihilated by fire a few years before.

The entire cost of the Exposition, exclusive of the value of exhibits, is estimated by the Controller at $50,000,000. This total is made up of $20,000,000 spent by San Francisco and California, $10,000,000 laid out in state and foreign buildings and displays, $10,000,000 by private exhibitors, and $10,000,000 by the one hundred concessionaires on the Joy Zone. San Francisco contributed $12,500,000, the State of California $5,000,000, and its fifty-eight counties, $2,500,000. The amounts expended by foreign nations range from $1,700,000 by Argentina to sums as low as $100,000. The State of New York spent nearly $1,000,000.

Ground Plan and Landscape Gardening

The Exposition a product of co-operation of the arts-The landscape made part of the scheme-Block grouping of palaces and courts-Plan of the buildings-McLaren's wonders in gardening-Succession of flowers throughout the Exposition-Changes overnight-Unique wall of living green.

The artistic quality which distinguishes this Exposition above all others in America or Europe rests on two outstanding facts: the substantial unity of its architectural scheme, and its harmony of color, keyed to Nature's coloring of the landscape in which it is placed. The site furnished the clue to the plan; co-operation made possible the great success with which it has been worked out.

"Centuries ago," said George W. Kelham, chief of Exposition architecture, "before the modern age of advanced specialization was dreamed of, had an architect been asked to create an exposition, he would have been not only an architect, but painter, sculptor and landscape engineer as well. He would have thought, planned and executed from this fourfold angle, and I doubt if it would have even occurred to him to think of one of the arts as detached from another." These words express the method of the Exposition builders. The scheme adopted was a unit, in which all of the arts were needed, and in which they all combined to a single end. Each building, each court, every garden and large mass of foliage, was designed as part of a balanced composition. To make the landscape an integral part of the Exposition picture, by fitting the Exposition to the landscape, was the common aim of architect, colorist, sculptor and landscape engineer. The Mediterranean setting offered by a sloping bench on the shore of the Golden Gate suggested, as most capable of high expression of beauty, the scheme of a city of the Far East, its great buildings walled in and sheltering its courts. The coloring of earth, sky and sea furnished the palette from which tints were chosen alike for palaces and gardens.

The beauty of this plan is matched by its practical advantages. The compact grouping of the Exposition palaces not only meant a saving of ground and labor, but it makes it easier to handle the crowds, and lessens the walking required of the visitor. There is no monotony. In developing the general idea, each architect and artist was left free to express his own personality and imagination. The result is that varied forms and colors in the different courts and buildings blend truly into the whole picture of an Oriental city, set in the midst of a vast amphitheater of hills and bay, arched by the fathomless blue of the California sky.

The ground plan is as simple as it is compact. Entering through the main gate at Scott Street, the visitor has the Exposition before him, practically an equal section on either hand. (See map, p. 30, 31.) On right and left in the South Garden are Festival Hall and the Palace of Horticulture. (p. 23, 24, 29.) In front is the Tower of Jewels, before it the Fountain of Energy. (p. 47.) The tower centers the south front of a solid block of eight palaces, so closely joined in structure, and so harmonized in architecture, as to make really a single palace. On the right and left of the tower are the Palaces of Manufactures and Liberal Arts; beyond them, on east and west, are Varied Industries and Education. Behind these four, and fronting on the bay from east to west, are Mines, Transportation, Agriculture and Food Products. In the center of the group, cut out of the corners of the Manufactures, Liberal Arts, Agriculture and Transportation Palaces, and entered from the south through the Tower of Jewels, is the great Court of the Universe, opened on east and west by the triumphal Arches of the Nations. (p. 59 and 63.) The Court opens northward between the Palaces of Transportation and Agriculture in a splendid colonnaded avenue to the Column of Progress, near the bay. (p. 57.)

Through the arch on the east the Court of the Universe opens into an avenue which leads to the Court of the Ages, cut out of the intersection of the four Palaces of Manufactures, Varied Industries, Mines and Transportation. (p. 70.) A similar avenue on the west passes to the Court of Seasons, carved from the common junction of Liberal Arts, Education, Food Products and Agriculture. (p. 79 and 80.) Avenues pass east and west and to the north from each of these two courts, and on the south each connects through an arch with a court set back into the south front of the palace group, the Courts of Flowers and Palms. (p. 85, 87, 88, 93, 100.) On east and west of this central group of eight palaces are the Palace of Machinery and the Palace of Fine Arts (p. 105, 112), serving architecturally to balance the scheme. East of the exhibit palaces is the Joy Zone, a mile-long street solidly built with bizarre places of amusement. Balancing the Zone on the west is the State and Foreign section, with the live-stock exhibits, the polo field, race track and stadium beyond, at the western extremity of the grounds. The state buildings stand along two avenues on the north side of the section; the foreign pavilions occupy its southern half.

The Tower of Jewels and the central palace group face south on the Avenue of Palms (p. 18), which, at its west end, turns as it passes the Fine Arts lagoon, and becomes the Avenue of Nations. This latter highway, bordered by the foreign buildings, joins at its western extremity the Esplanade, a broad avenue passing the north face of the palace group and continuing westward between the state and the foreign sections.

On the east, the Avenue of Progress divides the central group from the Palace of Machinery. Administration Avenue on the west separates the central group from the Palace of Fine Arts. Along the bay shore is the Marina, and between it and the Esplanade are the Yacht Harbor and the lawns of the North Gardens.

Surrounding all these buildings, filling the courts and bordering the avenues, are John McLaren's lovely gardens. For multitudes of visitors this landscape gardening is the most wonderful thing about the Exposition. The trees and flowers have been placed with perfect art; they look as though they had been there always. It is hard for a stranger to believe that three years ago the Exposition site was a marsh, and that these trees were transplanted last year.

The Avenue of Palms is bordered on each side for half a mile with a double row of California fan palms and Canary date palms, trees from eighteen to twenty-five feet high and festooned higher than a man's head with ivy and blooming nasturtium. (See p. 18.) These massive plants, soil, roots, vines and all, were brought bodily from Golden Gate Park. Against the south walls of the buildings facing this avenue are banked hundreds of eucalyptus globulus, forty to fifty feet high, with smaller varieties of eucalyptus, and yellow flowering acacias.

The Avenue of Progress is bordered with groups of Draceona indivisa, averaging twenty feet in height. The walls of the palaces on either hand are clothed with tall Monterey and Lawson cypresses and arbor vitae. Between these and the Draceonas of the avenue are planted specimens of Abies pinsapo, the Spanish fir. Banks of flowers and vines cover the ground around the bases of the trees. Administration Avenue has on one side the thickets of the Fine Arts lagoon, on the other, masses of eucalyptus globulus against the palace walls, finished off with other hardy trees and shrubs. Against the north front of the palaces are set Monterey cypresses and eucalyptus, banked with acacias.

The entire city side of the South Gardens is bordered by a wondrous wall of living green,-not a hedge, but truly a wall,-the most surprising of all McLaren's inventions. For this wall, though living, is not rooted in the ground, but is really a skeleton of timbers, three times the height of a man, paneled solidly on both sides with shallow boxes of earth thickly set with a tiny green plant, which, as though crushed down by the weight of its name, Mesembryantliemum spectabilis, hugs the soil closely. Each box, really nothing more than a tray, is barely deep enough to contain a couple of inches of earth, and is screened over with wire mesh to prevent the slice of soil from falling out when it is set on edge. Some thousands of these boxes are required to cover the entire wall, which thus appears a solid mass of greenery. The little plant looks like the common ice-plant of old-fashioned gardens, and is actually kin to it. It asks little of this world, is accustomed to grow in difficult places, and is kept green by sprinkling. If a section of it gives up the struggle, the tray may be replaced with a fresh one. From time to time a blush of tiny pink flowers runs over the wall. There seems to be no season for the blossoms, but whenever the sun shines, this delicate shimmer of bloom appears.

The season opened in the great sunken garden of the Court of the Universe with solid masses of rhododendron. The Court of the Ages was a pink flare of hyacinths, which, with an exquisite sense of the desert feeling of the court, were stripped of their leaves and left to stand on bare stalks. The South Gardens and the Court of Flowers were a golden glow of daffodils. Daffodils, too, were everywhere else, with rhododendron just breaking into bloom. The daffodil show lasted several weeks until, over night, it was replaced by acres of yellow tulips blooming above thick mats of pansies. This magic change was merely the result of McLaren's forethought. The daffodils had all been set at the right time to bloom when the Exposition opened. The pansies were set with them, but were unnoticed beneath the taller daffodils. Unnoticed also were the tulips, steadily shooting upward to be ready in bloom the moment the daffodils began to fail. One night and morning scores of workmen clipped off all the fading daffodils, and left a yellow sea of tulips with cups just opening. When the tulips faded early, because of continued rains, the solid masses of pansies remained to keep up the golden show. With the end of the yellow period came three months of pink flowers, to be followed in the closing third of the Exposition's life by a show of variegated blooms.

This marvelous sequence of flowers without a gap is not the result of chance, or even of California's floral prodigality, but of McLaren's hard-headed calculation. He actually rehearsed the whole floral scheme of the Exposition for three seasons beforehand. To a day, he knew the time that would elapse between the planting and the blooming of any flower he planned to use. Thus he scheduled his gardening for the whole season so that the gardens should always be in full bloom. In McLaren's program there are ten months of constant bloom, without a break, without a wait. No such gardening was ever seen before. Needless to say, it could hardly have been attempted elsewhere than in California.

The South Gardens

A charming foreground to the great palaces-Palace of Horticulture and some of its rare plants-Food for pirates-Ancient and blue-blooded forest dwarfs-The Horticultural Gardens-House of Hoo Hoo-Festival Hall, with its fine sculptures by Sherry Fry-A remarkable pipe organ.

Entering the Exposition by the main or Scott Street gate, the visitor has before him the beautiful South Gardens. (See p. 23.) These form an animated and effective foreground for the Exposition palaces. Except for their fountains, the gardens and the structures in them are less notable for sculpture than the central courts of the Exposition. Most of the plastic work here is purely decorative. The gardens are formal, French in style, laid out with long rectangular pools, each with a formal fountain, and each surrounded by a conventional balustrade with flower receptacles and lamp standards. In harmony with their surroundings, the buildings, too, are French, of florid, festival style.

The Palace of Horticulture, Bakewell and Brown, architects, is the largest and most splendid of the garden structures. (p. 24.) Byzantine in its architecture, suggesting the Mosque of Ahmed I, at Constantinople, its Gallic decorations have made it essentially French in spirit. The ornamentation of this palace is the most florid of any building in the Exposition proper. Yet this opulence is not inappropriate. In size and form, no less than in theme, the structure is well adapted to carry such rich decoration. This is the palace of the bounty of nature; its adornment symbolizes the rich yield of California fields.

In harmony also with the theme, the human figure is absent from the sculpture, save in the caryatids of the porches and the groups supporting the tall finials. Fruits and flowers, interwoven in heavy garlands and overflowing from baskets and urns, carry out the idea of profuse abundance. The great dome, larger than the dome of either St. Peter's at Rome or the Pantheon at Paris, is itself an overturned fruit basket, with a second latticed basket on its top. The conception of profusion becomes almost barbaric in the three pavilioned entrances, flanked on either side by the tall finials suggesting minarets. Here the Oriental influence of the architectural form, the mosque, becomes most pronounced, changing to French again in the caryatid porches.

Altogether, the Palace of Horticulture is a beautiful building, but rather hard to see properly from the ground. From an elevation, where it appears more as a whole, it is far more effective. Curiously, it photographs better than any other building here, save the Fine Arts Palace, but in actual view it hardly lives up to the pictures. Perhaps this is because the comparatively small portions of the structure seen between the trees near-by are dwarfed by the huge dome, while in photographs the camera emphasizes the lower and nearer sections and reduces the proportions of the dome.

The exhibit housed under the great dome should not be passed by. A vivid bit of the tropics is the Cuban display. Here, in an atmosphere artificially heated and moistened to reproduce the steaming jungle, is massed a splendid exhibit of those island trees and flowers that most of us know only through pictures and stories of southern seas. Around the central source of light, which is hidden under tropic vines, stands a circle of royal palms; and planted thickly over the remaining space are jungle trees, vivid enough to our imagination, but many of which have never before been seen in this country.

Boys who feel pirate blood in their veins will revel in this reproduction of the scenes of imagined adventure. Any reasonable pirate could be quite happy here. For here is the breadfruit tree, read of in many a tale of castaways; also the cocoanut palm, with the fruits hanging among the fronds, waiting for the legendary monkey to scamper up the trunk and hurl the great balls at the heads of the beholders. Here, too, are the mango, and many sorts of bananas, and the cabbage palm, another favorite resource of starving adventurers. With these there are other jungle denizens,-the bamboo palm, the paperleaf palm, splendid specimens of the world-old cycad family, the guanabana, and a Tom Thumb palm, which, full grown, is no more than a handbreadth high.

Ancient among trees are the two specimens of microcycas from the swamps of Cuba. These Methuselahs of the forest are at least 1,000 years old, according to the botanists. They are among the slowest growing of living things, and neither of them is much taller than a man. They were seedlings when Alfred the Great ruled England, and perhaps four feet high when Columbus first broke through the western seas. In the four centuries of Cuban history they have not grown so much again.

These venerable trees belong to the bluest-blooded aristocracy of the vegetable world. Ages ago they inhabited our northern states. Their family has come down practically unchanged from the steaming days of the Carboniferous period, when ferns grew one hundred feet high, and thronged with other rank tropical growths in matted masses to form the coal measures. The fossil remains of cycads in the rocks of that period prove that they once flourished in the tropic swamps where now are the hills of Wyoming and Dakota.

Scattered among the trees is a host of flowering vines, of huge crotons with variegated leaves, giant gardenias and tropical lilies. When these bloom, the air of this transplanted jungle is heavy with the perfume of their own island habitat.

The Horticultural Gardens south of the Palace belong to it, and contain a large part of the horticultural exhibits. As they were planted for competitive exhibition purposes, they will not show the constant beauty that appears in the South Gardens. Here we must wait for the flowers in their season, and not expect to have them changed overnight for us by the gardeners' magic.

Back of this horticultural garden is the House of Hoo Hoo, in Forestry Court, flanked by the Pine and Redwood Bungalows. It needs but a glance at its beguiling loveliness to know that here is another lesson in art and architecture by Bernard Maybeck. Here again is poetry in architecture, of a different order from the noble theme of Maybeck's Fine Arts Palace, but none the less poetry. This is a sylvan idyll, telling of lofty trees, cool shades, and secret bowers of fern and vine and wild flower, in the moist and tangled redwood forests. There is little used but rough-barked tree trunks, but what delicate harmony of arrangement!

This lumbermen's lodge is one building outside the Exposition palaces that should not be missed, even though almost hidden away against the south wall. It is worth pondering over. No one may want to build a house like it, but it proclaims how beauty can be attained with simple materials and just proportions.

Festival Hall, Robert Farquhar, architect, balances the Palace of Horticulture in the architectural plan of the South Gardens. (p. 29.) It, too, is French in style, its architecture suggested by the Theatre des Beaux Arts in Paris, a design which furnished the dome necessary to harmonize with that of the palace to the west. As architecture, however, it fails to hold up its end with the splendid Horticultural Palace. Its dome is too large, and has too little structure around it, to be placed so near the ground without an effect of squattiness. Its festive adornment is extremely moderate. On the cornice above the main entrance is the rhyton, the ancient Greek drinking horn, symbol of festivity.

The sculpture, all done by Sherry E. Fry, carries out the same idea. The graceful figures poised on the corner domes are Torch Bearers. On the pylons at either end of the semicircular arcade of the main entrance are two reclining figures. On the right is Bacchus, with his grapes and wineskin,-a magnificently "pickled" Bacchus! On the left a woman is listening to the strains of festal music. (p. 32.) Each of the pedestals before the false windows at the ends of the arcade supports a figure of Flora with garlands of flowers. On the ground below the two Floras are two of the most delightful pieces of all the Exposition sculpture. One is a little Pan, pipes in hand, sitting on a skin spread over an Ionic capital. This is a real boy, crouching to watch the lizard that has crawled out from beneath the stone. The other is a young girl dreaming the dreams of childhood. There is something essentially girlish about this. Unfortunately, it is now almost hidden by shrubbery.

Within Festival Hall is one of the half-dozen greatest organs in the world. It has more than 7,000 pipes. The heaviest of them weigh as much as 1,200 pounds apiece. Though mere size is not the essential quality of a fine instrument, it is hard to ignore the real immensity of this. The echo organ alone is larger than most pipe organs. This complementary instrument, which is played from the console of the main organ, is placed under the roof of the hall, above the center of the ceiling. Its tones, floating down through the apertures in the dome, echo the themes of the great organ.

Few organs have so mighty a note as the sixty-four-foot open pitch attainable on the Exposition's instrument. Speaking by itself, this note has no sound. It is only a tremendous quaking of the whole building, as though the earth were shuddering. By itself it has no place in organ music. It is not intended to be struck alone. It is used only as a foundation upon which to build other tones. In combination it adds majesty to the music, rumbling in a gigantic undertone to the lighter notes.

Even the open stops in this organ are of more than ordinary dimensions. The usual limit in a pipe organ is the sixteen-foot open stop. But in this organ there are several pipes, both of wood and of metal, thirty-two feet or more in length.

Two small buildings, balanced on either side of the Scott-street entrance, are the Press Building and the Exposition home of the National Young Women's Christian Association. They are alike, French in style, and fronted with caryatid porches.

The real glory of the South Gardens lies in their flowers, and in the charming setting the landscape engineers have here given to the south facade of the palace group. There is the air of Versailles in the planned gayety of the scene. In this the pools and fountains, the formal gardens, the massed trees and shrubbery, and the two palaces themselves, play their part.