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| 1915 Panama Pacific Exposition |
San Francisco is always ready for a party, but by 1914 the City was really ready for a party. The 7.8 magnitude earthquake in 1906 and the resulting fire destroyed 80% of the city. Residents were living in a tent city near the waterfront. Temporary kitchens were set up to feed the thousands of homeless. What was salvageable from the collapsed structures was often sold to Bay Area residents to raise money for the rebuilding of the city. The San Francisco disaster devastated the city, California and shocked the nation.
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Jewel Tower
Standing 435 feet above the fair
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Every great Highway needs a great destination. For Route 66 it was Hollywood, Southern California and the Santa Monica pier. For the Yellowstone Trail it was, initially, Yellowstone National Park. For the Lincoln Highway the great destination was the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. The destination was a Duesy. The fair provided San Francisco with a place to strut its stuff. California and America got in on the act. The fair opened less than a year after the completion of the Panama Canal. (In fact, the fair featured a working model of the canal.) The nation was feeling its oats.
The years leading up to World War I were an incredibly optimistic time. That optimism is reflected in the Lincoln Highway and the Panama Pacific International Exposition. The fair occupied 635 acres just east of the Presidio. Much of the fairgrounds was built on fill land. Many of the razed buildings from the earthquake and fire made up the fill.
It is certainly not an unrelated coincidence that plans for the Lincoln Highway were announced as San Francisco was getting ready to host the world. Great visionaries, like Carl Fisher, knew how to exploit events in order to accomplish goals. When Carl Fisher announced: "Let's build it while were still young enough to enjoy it!" he had in mind driving to the fair. At the September 1912 organizational meeting, Fisher proposed that the Highway be ready for travel by May 1, 1915 in order to accommodate "a corps of 2,500 automobiles that can be taken over this road to the opening of the Exposition in either May or June, 1915." Indeed, Henry Joy, president of the Packard motor Company and later president of the Lincoln Highway Association made the trip from Detroit on the Lincoln Highway and arrived at the fair to show off the mud and road grime on his Packard.
The fair was magnificent! All the more remarkable is the fact that the fair opened less than 10 years after the City's total destruction. I doubt that the United States of today would even have completed the application, planning or the permit process for the rebuilding of the city. Let alone deal with the protests or lawsuits.
Of course attractions at the fair included a carnival midway. But also included were some of the wonders of the world and the wonders of this confident new age of 1915. The horrors of World War I had not yet reached America, while other nations participated in the fair perhaps as an antidote to that war.
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| Model T Assembly Line at the fair |
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Aero-Scope
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| Scale Working Model of Panama Canal |
The buildings and structures at the fair were constructed of a lumber framework and then covered with a material called staff. Staff is made of burlap covered with plaster. It is temporary at best and consequently practically nothing remains of the fair. The most famous remaining structure is the Palace of fine arts. As a child I remember driving by the Palace of Fine Arts and seeing it surrounded with a chain-link fence looking like it was ready to fall over. It was.
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| Palace of Fine Arts, 1915 |
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| Japanese Pavilion |
The 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition served as a sort of coming-out party for San Francisco. San Francisco would no longer be seen as a rough-and-tumble frontier town. Instead it would take its place as one of America's and indeed the world's great cities.
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Souvenirs and memorabilia from the fair, including an exhibitor's
badge for the first day, a Voltamp model PFE car made for the Southern
Pacific Railroad exhibit, a letter opener and a paperweight. These
items once belonged to Elbridge Russell who, attended the fair and ran the trains at the Southern Pacific Exhibit. At his death, Elbridge left the items to my brother, Fritz |
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| More Family Souvenirs from the 1915 fair. The spoon and paperweight are from my family. Linda's Great Aunt Jesse bought the ceramic sailboat on her visit to the fair. |
San Francisco was one of the truly great World's Fairs. I regret not being born 60 years earlier.
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| The Fair at night |
