288 Days is an independent history of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, the "Jewel City" San Francisco built and lived in for 288 days in 1915, with a navigable 3D reconstruction of its grounds and a documentary film. Everything here is drawn from sources you can check, and the bibliography lists them all.
The writing
The chapters and gazetteer entries rest mostly on primary sources from 1915 to 1921, all of them now in the public domain. The main ones are the Official Guide (1915), Frank Morton Todd's five-volume official history The Story of the Exposition (1921), John D. Barry's The City of Domes (1915), the exposition's own fact books, and the catalogues of the art and sculpture. Later histories and archival collections fill in what happened after the fair closed. Every figure is cited. Where sources disagree, as they often do about the Tower's height, the number of novagems, the size of the Zone or the count of participating nations, the page says so and doesn't pick one silently. Quotations come only from period sources, which are in the public domain. Anything from modern writers is paraphrased and credited.
The 3D reconstruction
The reconstruction works in a coordinate frame tied to the real city. Its origin is the center of the Tower of Jewels on the line of Scott Street. Its axes follow San Francisco's Western Addition street grid, which runs about nine degrees off true north. Building footprints were measured from the U.S. Geological Survey map of the site made during the fair. That map was scaled using the Palace of Machinery's documented size, 968 by 368 feet, then checked against the dimensions in the Official Guide and in Todd. With that scale, the Machinery's west front falls on the line of Fillmore Street, just where Todd puts the Avenue of Progress. Street centerlines come from OpenStreetMap. Alcatraz, Angel Island, Fort Mason, the Marin Headlands and Mount Tamalpais sit at their real positions. The sun follows San Francisco's actual solar path for June 1915.
Heights come from the period record. The exhibit palaces rise 70 feet to the cornice, 113 to the gables and 160 to the tops of the central domes. The Tower of Jewels is 435 feet, Horticulture's glass dome 186, and the lantern of Festival Hall reaches 221. The Rotunda of the Palace of Fine Arts is 163½ feet. The massing, placement and color scheme are faithful to the sources. Ornament is simplified, and some smaller buildings are built from generic styles, so treat positions as accurate to within a few tens of meters. The state and foreign pavilions and the shows on the Zone are placed from Todd's accounts of which building stood beside which, and from a 1915 concession map.
Images
Period photographs, postcards and plates are shown from Wikimedia Commons. Most are in the public domain because they were published before 1929. A few carry Creative Commons licenses, and each one is credited where it appears. Click any image to see its source and license.
Colophon
This is a static site with no tracking and no cookies. The 3D reconstruction is built with three.js, and the type is set in Cormorant Garamond, Cinzel, Source Serif and Inter. Text and reconstruction © Keith Adler.