Maybeck designed the palace and the water as a single picture, and the lagoon did as much work as the colonnade. It separated the art palace from the eight-palace main group, so visitors had to walk around one end of it. That was deliberate. When there was talk of building causeways across, Maybeck asked Director of Works H. D. H. Connick to stop it, and Connick 'conveniently found it impossible to get hold of any money for the causeways' (Todd).
The planting around it was among John McLaren's best. Todd wrote that the inlets, capes and two small islands were planted so informally that they 'seemed like the vestiges of some primeval swamp.' There were even dead trees, left as nature might have left them, and walls of mesembryanthemum flanking the rotunda that looked like 'green-clad, eternal cliffs.' Visitors seldom saw the palace whole from across the water; Maybeck wanted it partly hidden. Gulls and mallards fed on the pool.
In front of the rotunda a massive altar rose from a ledge in the water, and Ralph Stackpole's kneeling figure tended its flame. Todd said that seen across the pool it 'seemed more like a living person than any one of the other statues.' Loan sculpture was placed along the margins, including Pratt's Whaleman at the north end and Anna Coleman Ladd's Wind and Spray in a sharp little bay at the south end, bordered with buttercups and calla lilies.
On the east bank ran the Avenue of Administration, lined with tall eucalypti that had already been growing on the site. Behind them rose the west walls of the Palaces of Education and Food Products, with their two great half-domes (Philosophy and Physical Vigor) and Charles Harley's archaeological niche sculptures facing the water.
The Palace and Lagoon he thought of and treated throughout as parts of one composition; neither one wholly effective without the other.
Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 2 (1921), ch. LVIII
At a glance
- The lagoon was made in the fall of 1913, when the Landscape Department began planting around it (Todd vol. 1, ch. LXII).
- Before the exposition, a brackish lagoon fed by springs and bay seepage lay between Baker and Lyon Streets, reaching into the Presidio (Todd vol. 1, ch. XXXII).
- Two islets were planted with trees and shrubs (Todd vol. 2, ch. LXII).
- Eighteen searchlights on the palace roofs east of the lagoon lit the Fine Arts Palace at night (Todd vol. 2, ch. LXIII).
- Charles R. Harley's 'Triumph of the Field' and 'Abundance' alternated in twelve large niches on the lagoon-facing west facades of Education and Food Products (Todd vol. 2, ch. LXI).
Afterward
Survives as the lagoon of today's Palace of Fine Arts. Its lagoons and walkways were renovated, with the work completed in early 2009 (Wikipedia). Everything east of it that faced it across the water (the Avenue of Administration and the main group) was demolished in 1916.
The site today
Present-day photographs and video of this spot are being made for the film; each frame below is a slot for one of them.
East bank of the lagoon, on the path off Baker St between North Point and Bay, the rotunda dead ahead across the water
Have a photo of this spot? Email it to hello@288days.com with code S01 and up to 50 characters of credit. It appears here and in the film.
Same spot as pfa-across-lagoon
Have a photo of this spot? Email it to hello@288days.com with code S05 and up to 50 characters of credit. It appears here and in the film.
Launch from Baker St / the Palace grounds side (San Francisco Recreation and Parks property, film permit and drone authorization required); orbit the rotunda at 150–250 ft
Aerial placeholder. Drone footage is flown under permit by the production; not accepting submissions.
Sources
- Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 2, chs. LVIII, LXI, LXII, LXIII
- Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 4, ch. IV (causeways refused; lagoon-side sculpture)
- Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 1, chs. XXXII, LXII
- Wikipedia: Palace of Fine Arts, 2009 lagoon renovation