When the Panama-Pacific International Exposition closed its gates on December 4, 1915, San Francisco residents mourned the passing of the spectacular event. The Catholic diocesan newspaper, the Monitor, remarked, “This has been an ‘annus mirabilis,’ a wonderful year.”1 Mary Eugenia Pierce noted in her diary, “Everybody tired to death today! and yet all lamenting the Fair!”2 Walter De Vecchi remembered, “Thousands of people were reluctant to leave. . . . I saw many ladies and men too . . . with tears in their eyes, knowing that this grand party was over for all time.”3 To all of these San Franciscans, the PPIE was a significant event, a part of which they each claimed as their own. But after nine months, the lights went out, the celebration ended, and the exposition became a part of San Francisco’s history.
Many San Franciscans believed 1915 was an annus mirabilis. Together, fair officials and city residents made the PPIE into a financial success—recouping expenditures and ending with a profit—and an event that celebrated San Francisco’s dominance of Pacific trade. Foreign nations such as China and Japan invested huge sums in elaborate buildings and displays, and the city hosted hundreds of foreign dignitaries during the fair. Millions of visitors poured into the city and spent funds both on and off the fairgrounds. Residents who held a season pass enjoyed world-class concerts, theater performances, and appearances by world-renowned figures ranging from Helen Keller to Theodore Roosevelt. San Francisco proved it was no longer a frontier town perched on the edge of the Pacific Ocean but a cosmopolitan, twentieth-century American city.
During the following years, the city and state would feel the legacy of the fair as city leaders continued to sing the fair’s praises. “It was our exposition,” noted one 1916 San Francisco Chronicle column, and “we rejoice to tell the world” about its successes. The early months of 1916 witnessed an economic upsurge in all key indicators in the city, and pundits gave credit to the fair.4 As the city continued to prosper economically, migrants poured into the state over the next decades. California’s tourist board reported that almost 700,000 people visited the PPIE from out of state, creating unmatched publicity for the city and state.5 Just as fair boosters had wished in 1910, the fair advertised the bounty and opportunities of California to the rest of the nation and world. The displays of California counties alone offered impressive snapshots of the state’s natural bounty. Early reports indicated that many counties felt the effects of the fair. “So it is that the Exposition did much for us in Central California,” reported a Napa County representative. “We are discovered now. And with the close of the Exposition has come the awakening to the fact that tourist travel means dollars raining down on every line of business.”6
Fig. 58. Destruction of the Court of the Universe. (San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library.)
The fair generated immediate benefits for the city of San Francisco. It sped up the city’s post-earthquake reconstruction and created new streetcar lines, allowing the eventual development of the fair site into the Marina neighborhood. But it also revealed simmering urban social and political conflicts. The civic unity sought by fair builders was an illusion in 1915; it would fracture completely over the next few years. The coalition of the business community around the PPIE helped it shift the balance between labor and capital in the years after the fair. The Chamber of Commerce, for instance, used tactics adopted by PPIE management to resolve a June 1916 waterfront strike.7 A far more serious conflict erupted in July, with the bombing of a Preparedness Day parade. The same businessmen who had created the PPIE sponsored the parade, and more than twenty thousand of the city’s professional class and their wives participated in it. The July 22 bombing killed nine and injured forty others. Allegations of perjury during the trials of five suspects and the subsequent conviction and sentencing of two of them—Warren Billings and Thomas Mooney—to life in prison and execution, respectively, polarized the city and drew national attention to the city’s radical politics.8
The next decades witnessed continued citywide debates over city development, public ownership, and the expansion of the municipal railways. The construction of the Stockton Street Tunnel in 1914, as part of the expansion of the railways for the PPIE, provided the model for the 1918 Twin Peaks Tunnel. These rail lines, and later expansion, fostered a postwar construction boom in western regions of the city.9 The eventual development of the exposition’s site into the Marina, a wealthy neighborhood, fulfilled the fears of the opponents of Harbor View: the long-term benefits of the work done on the site benefited property owners rather than the city at large. By 1924, a local real estate corporation had acquired the property, built streets, installed utilities, and subdivided it into parcels for housing.10 Of all the exposition’s many buildings, only the Palace of Fine Arts remained.
The ethnic, racial, and gender conflicts that the fair brought to light persisted long past 1915. The California legislature passed a strengthened Alien Land Law in 1920, and the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act—based on national quotas—codified Asian exclusion. The internment of Japanese Americans in California in the 1940s represented the culmination of the anti-Japanese racism visible in the 1913 debates on the Alien Land Law. Although San Francisco Catholics were fully accepted members of society, as their extensive participation in the fair demonstrates, the 1920s saw extensive anti-Catholic activity in other parts of the nation. The debates over female sexuality at the fair, particularly in the exposition’s Joy Zone, reflected the much larger discussions in U.S. society about female sexuality. By the 1920s, developments resulted in the new “flapper” image for women, in which their bodies and sexuality were far less disguised than they had been in previous decades. Although suffragists emerged victorious in 1920 with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, the drive further splintered the women’s movement as women worked for a variety of different goals rather than focusing on the single goal of suffrage. The diversity of female voices present at the PPIE had offered a glimpse of the future of women’s organizing, as suffrage was only one of many causes forwarded by politically minded women after 1920.
Fig. 59. Palace of Fine Arts. (Donald G. Larson Collection, Special Collections Research Center, California State University Fresno.)
Although the PPIE is often perceived as the last world’s fair of the Victorian Era and a marker of the Progressive Era’s decline, it should be equally understood as a harbinger of things to come. San Francisco’s cosmopolitan population, its status as a suffrage state, its relatively large Asian population, its businessmen shifting their focus to the Pacific rather than to Europe for economic expansion, and its history of tolerance toward vice and sexuality—all of these elements reflected growing trends in U.S. society. These issues influenced the fair in ways that offered glimpses not only of the past but also of the future. In this way, this particular world’s fair stands out for two reasons: it celebrated a contemporary event—the completion of the Panama Canal—and it offered insights into the social and political conflicts of the coming decades.
The fair left concrete legacies for the city. Many PPIE activities occurred at the Civic Center Auditorium, a downtown building constructed by the PPIE. As part of the $5 million bond issue raised by the city, city supervisors required that the PPIE use part of the money to construct a building that would be of permanent use for the city. The city and the fair both contributed to the auditorium’s construction, and the complex included a new city hall and public library. After the fair ended, the PPIE donated the organ it had purchased for the Festival Hall to the center.11 The Civic Center Auditorium remains an important San Francisco landmark.
Most of the fair’s buildings were razed in 1916. A few were put to other uses. The Ohio Building was sailed down the bay to serve a variety of recreational uses until it was torched in the 1950s.12 The California State Building and the Column of Progress remained standing along the Marina Green since the fair owned the land under the column and part of the California Building. Plans proceeded for the California Building to be converted to a State Normal School until its location was deemed too close to the Presidio and its military men. Both the California Building and the column were eventually destroyed.13
As many San Franciscans know, the only building from the PPIE still standing today is the Palace of Fine Arts. The home of the Exploratorium Museum until 2013, the current structure is a reconstruction of the original. As the PPIE drew to a close, supporters organized to save the palace, arguing it was a fitting tribute to the fair. Over the ensuing decades the space was put to many uses. During the New Deal, Works Progress Administration artists repaired the peeling artwork and crumbling statuary. In 1934, the palace found a new function when it became the site of eighteen tennis courts. During World War II the U.S. Army requisitioned it as storage for army jeeps, resulting in additional damage to the already fragile structure. When the army relinquished the palace to the city after the war and the building was determined to be unsafe for public use, a debate erupted about the structure’s future. Would it house tennis courts? A National Guard armory? Or something else entirely?14
The debate continued at the local and state level for the next decade, until in 1957 Assemblyman Caspar Weinberger finally convinced legislators to approve a grant of $2 million toward rebuilding the structure if matching funds could be found. Local businessman Walter Johnson, a “struggling young lawyer” at the time of the PPIE and head of the Palace of Fine Arts League, agreed two years later to donate the matching gift.15 City residents passed a $1.8 million bond issue the next year, and soon the city had sufficient funds to begin the restoration. Supporters failed to raise enough money to fully restore the building, but architects met the challenge of modifying the plans and began the project. The original building was gutted, leaving only the shell. Artists rebuilt the statues and gardeners replanted the grounds, re-creating a structure that echoed with its past majesty. It is now a significant part of the San Francisco skyline and a treasured San Francisco landmark.
The PPIE demonstrated to the world that the city of San Francisco was reborn. It sped up urban development and solidified the city’s claim as empress of the Pacific. The fair also highlighted contemporary social and political issues that would persist for decades to come. Although the city would not remain the largest city on the West Coast for long, today it is still a significant economic center of the West Coast and of the Pacific Rim, goals it sought to solidify through the PPIE. City residents cherished their memories of 1915, and even after the city hosted another fair, the Golden Gate International Exposition of 1939, the PPIE occupied a fond place in many residents’ hearts. For many, 1915 marked a truly annus mirabilis, one that they remembered when they gazed on the Palace of Fine Arts or the Marina Green.