What Survived

The Exposition was built to be torn down, and nearly all of it was. What remains takes some finding. One palace, rebuilt in concrete, stands on its original site. A concert hall the fair built downtown is still in use. A museum was built as a permanent copy of one of the pavilions. A neighborhood grew on the fairground's fill. Scattered around the Bay Area and beyond are statues, murals, a telescope, a railway and a few buildings that were floated away on barges. This page takes stock of them.

The Palace of Fine Arts

The Palace of Fine Arts is the only structure the National Park Service counts as still standing on the fairgrounds, and even it has been rebuilt. It was kept open after the fair as an art gallery. It then declined through decades of odd uses, including tennis courts, an Army warehouse, a telephone-book depot and a fire station, until it was closed to the public in 1952. Private money and public bonds paid to demolish and rebuild it in concrete between 1964 and 1967, at a cost of $7.6 million. Walter S. Johnson gave about $2 million to start the work and more later. From 1969 to 2013 it housed the Exploratorium, and a restoration of about $21 million was completed around 2010. The full story is in The Art Exhibition. The palace is a city landmark and has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 2005. See Palace of Fine Arts and Fine Arts Lagoon.

The Civic Auditorium

The one large permanent building the Exposition put up was not on the fairgrounds. It stood in the Civic Center. In 1912 the city bought the block bounded by Hayes, Larkin, Polk and Grove streets, the site of the old Mechanics' Pavilion, for $701,437.08. The Exposition built an auditorium there as its gift to San Francisco. Its architects, according to San Francisco's landmark records, were John Galen Howard, Frederick H. Meyer and John Reid Jr. It cost $1,322,734, of which the Exposition paid about $1.1 million. The fair's final accounts carry it as $1,089,780. According to Todd, it opened with a masked ball on January 9, 1915, six weeks before the fair itself, and it was named the Exposition Auditorium by the Board of Supervisors on December 14, 1915. On December 30, 1915, Moore handed Mayor Rolph a golden key to it. The great Austin organ from Festival Hall was moved there and dedicated by the city organist, Edwin Lemare, on April 8, 1917. In 1920 it housed the Democratic National Convention, which Todd notes was the first national convention of a major party held west of the Rockies. In 1992 it was renamed the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, and it is still in use. See Exposition Auditorium (Civic Center).

The Legion of Honor

The French Pavilion was itself a copy of the Palais de la Légion d'Honneur, the Hôtel de Salm in Paris. Alma de Bretteville Spreckels loved it, and after the fair the French government agreed to let her build a permanent version. The war delayed construction until 1921. The California Palace of the Legion of Honor opened on Armistice Day, November 11, 1924, on the site of the old City Cemetery at Lands End. It was dedicated to the roughly 3,600 Californians who died in France in the First World War. Rodin's The Thinker, which greeted visitors at the 1915 French Pavilion, now sits in its courtyard. It is part of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. See French Pavilion (Palace of the Legion of Honor).

A neighborhood on the fill

When the Exposition's leases ran out, the land went back to its owners. The Exposition pumped more mud onto lots that had not been filled to the grade its leases promised, finishing in January 1917. It also bought nine blocks along the waterfront, east of the Yacht Harbor, for $443,812, and passed them to the State so that the shore road and the green along it would stay public. Todd calls that shore drive "the Marina." According to San Francisco Heritage, the name took hold for the new neighborhood as houses went up on the old fairground in the 1920s, and the district was largely built out by the early 1930s.

The fill had a long memory. In the Loma Prieta earthquake of October 17, 1989, the Marina was badly damaged. According to the California Geological Survey, the loose fill liquefied, 35 buildings were destroyed, and broken gas lines started fires. The San Francisco Fire Department credits the fireboat Phoenix and its portable water system with saving the district. Todd's history says the 1912 fill was pumped from the bay bottom, about 70 percent sand. The Survey adds that dune sand and rubble from the 1906 earthquake also went into the lagoon. The United States Geological Survey found the heaviest damage concentrated on the old fill.

Marina Green, the harbor and Crissy Field

Three pieces of the fair's shoreline survive in some form. The lawn of Marina Green, where kites fly today, was the fair's North Gardens and esplanade (see The Marina, the Esplanade and the North Gardens). The small-boat Yacht Harbor, whose breakwater was the Scintillator's pier, was left to the city as a permanent harbor, along with the Exposition's riprap seawall, and the harbor is still in use. At the west end, the fair's racetrack, drill ground and livestock yards on Presidio land stayed with the Army. In 1919 the Army chose the old racetrack site for an airfield. Crissy Field was finished by 1921 and flew planes until operations moved to Hamilton Field in the 1930s, according to the Park Service. The site was restored as parkland and tidal marsh around 2000. The Park Service says the racetrack's outline can still be traced at the edge of the grass airfield (see Race Track, Aviation Field, Drill Grounds, Polo Field and Stadium).

Buildings that sailed away

A handful of fair buildings were sold and moved:

• The Ohio Building floated down the bay on a raft. Todd writes that ferry passengers were astonished to see it. It became a club in the marshes of San Mateo County, and accounts differ on whether that was at Belmont or San Carlos. It later became a speakeasy and then an aviation workshop. According to the San Mateo Daily Journal, it was burned deliberately on December 14, 1956.
• The Japanese Pavilion's tea house was barged to Belmont and hauled into the hills, where for decades it served as a restaurant, most recently The Van's. Its current status is unconfirmed. The main Japanese Pavilion, which the city had accepted, collapsed in a windstorm while being moved.
• The Wisconsin and Virginia buildings "and one or two more" went across the bay to Santa Venetia in Marin County, according to Todd. We have not been able to confirm whether any survive.
• The Victor Company's pavilion was rafted to San Rafael and reassembled as a clubhouse at Fifth and H streets, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
• The Oregon Building, the "log Parthenon," was given to the Army and stayed in the Presidio as a soldiers' club. It has since been demolished. See Oregon Building.

Sculpture and other survivors

The fair's plaster sculpture was demolished with the buildings. A few pieces survived in other materials or other places:

• The End of the Trail: after the fair, James Earle Fraser's plaster was taken to Mooney Grove Park in Visalia, California. In 1968 it went to the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, where it is on display. A bronze cast now stands at Mooney Grove. See The End of the Trail.
• The Pioneer Mother: Charles Grafly's bronze was always meant to be permanent. After years of neglect it was shown at the 1939–40 Golden Gate International Exposition and installed in Golden Gate Park in 1940, near Stow Lake. See Pioneer Mother Monument.
• Calder's Star: a bronze of the Star Maiden from the Court of the Universe colonnades stands at One Sansome Street downtown. The Chronicle describes it as a 1983 replica.
• Brangwyn's murals from the Court of Abundance are in the Herbst Theatre.
• According to the Chronicle's 2015 survey, other survivors include elephant flagpole bases and a fountain in Viña del Mar Park in Sausalito, the "Rachel" telescope at the Chabot Space & Science Center, London plane trees at the University of California, Berkeley, and the fair's miniature Overfair Railway, now at Cal Poly's Swanton Pacific Ranch.
• Novagems: in 1918 the Exposition paid customs duty on some twelve tons of the Tower of Jewels' cut-glass "jewels," and it had given cases of them away as souvenirs. How many survive in private hands is unknown.

Coins and stamps

Congress authorized a set of commemorative coins by an act approved January 16, 1915. They were struck at the San Francisco Mint, and half dollars could be struck at the Mint's exhibit on the fairgrounds. The act called for a $50 piece recalling the octagonal California "slugs" of 1851. There were five coins in all. When the Auditorium was handed to the city in December 1915, Moore was presented with "a set of five commemorative Exposition gold coins, struck at the San Francisco Mint," in Todd's words.

The Post Office got in earlier. On January 1, 1913, it issued four Panama-Pacific stamps, all inscribed "San Francisco, 1915" and designed by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing's Clair Aubrey Huston. The 1-cent stamp showed Balboa, the 2-cent the canal (the Pedro Miguel locks), the 5-cent the Golden Gate, and the 10-cent the discovery of San Francisco Bay. The 10-cent value's orange-yellow ink printed badly and was changed to a darker orange later in 1913. A 1914–15 printing with a different perforation makes them, according to the Postal Museum, the only flat-plate American commemoratives issued in two perforation types (see The Canal).

The centennial, 2015

The fair's hundredth anniversary brought a burst of attention. A citywide consortium, PPIE100, coordinated events. The California Historical Society mounted "City Rising: San Francisco and the 1915 World's Fair," which opened February 21, 2015, the day after the centennial of opening day, and ran into January 2016. The de Young Museum opened "Jewel City: Art from San Francisco's Panama-Pacific International Exposition" on October 17, 2015. It reassembled more than 200 works from the fair's art exhibition and ran into early January 2016. The historian Laura A. Ackley's San Francisco's Jewel City: The Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915, published by Heyday with the California Historical Society, won a California Book Award gold medal in 2015.

Sources

• Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition (1921): vol. 2, ch. XLVI ("The City's Heritage," the Auditorium); vol. 5, chs. XXXV–XXXVIII (the Auditorium, salvage, moved buildings, the Marina purchase, preservation).
• California Office of Historic Preservation, California Historical Landmark nomination, "Palace of Fine Arts" (2021); National Park Service, National Register listing 04000659; National Park Service, "Legacy of the PPIE" and "Crissy Airfield" (Golden Gate National Recreation Area).
• NoeHill, San Francisco Landmarks: Bill Graham Civic Auditorium; Pioneer Mother; Palace of Fine Arts.
• Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, "Legion of Honor history."
• San Francisco Heritage, "The Marina District"; California Geological Survey, Marina District poster (Loma Prieta, 1989); U.S. Geological Survey, Professional Paper 1551-F (1992); San Francisco Fire Department history.
• Joan Levy, "The stately Ohio Building met an inglorious end" and "A Peninsula relic of 1915 Expo," San Mateo Daily Journal (2006).
• Sam Whiting, "Panama-Pacific International Expo: Tracking down the artifacts," San Francisco Chronicle, February 14, 2015.
• Oklahoma Historical Society, Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, "End of the Trail."
• U.S. Mint, Panama-Pacific commemorative coin legislation (Public No. 233, 63rd Congress); American Numismatic Association, "1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition Half Dollar"; CoinWeek, "1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition Coins and Medals."
• Smithsonian National Postal Museum, "Panama-Pacific" (commemorative issues, 1898–1925).
• California Historical Society, "City Rising" exhibition page; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, "Jewel City" exhibition page; Laura A. Ackley, sf1915.com.