South Gardens

Visitors entering by the main Scott Street gate found themselves in the South Gardens, the exposition's great foreground and its 'main distributing area' (Official Guide). The gardens stretched east to west between the green dome of Festival Hall and the glass bubble of the Palace of Horticulture, with the long south facade of the walled city and the Tower of Jewels rising behind the palms of the Avenue of Palms to the north.

The plan was a formal French garden. Todd compared it to the water gardens at Nîmes, framed by low balustrades crowned with great ornamental vases and by borders of veronica and box. At the center, on the Scott Street axis, stood the Fountain of Energy in a quatrefoil pool. From it two oblong pools, each 300 ft long, reached east and west, with Arthur Putnam's mermaid fountains at their far ends. Rumsey's Pizarro and Niehaus's Cortez, painted the green of old Pompeiian bronze, rode on tall pedestals in front of the Tower.

Color was managed like stage lighting. Six hundred thousand bulbs went in before opening day: yellow pansies, daffodils and yellow tulips, 200,000 of each, so that yellow carried the gardens until June. Twenty thousand pink begonias followed, making 'a beautiful old-rose carpet around the Fountain of Energy.' The Guide said the plantings changed every six weeks, raised by the hundreds of thousands in the exposition's greenhouses.

This was also the fair's front parlor. The official opening-day ceremonies were held on a grandstand built against the Tower of Jewels, facing the gardens, and the Press Building and Y.W.C.A. Building stood just inside the gate on either side.

The South Garden, the most pretentious of all the gardens, is laid out in the pattern of a formal French garden, surrounded by a low balustrade, with pools, fountains and vases of various designs to lend accent.

Official Guide of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (1915)

At a glance

• Among the earliest plantings were four large island groups of trees, placed to frame Festival Hall and the Palace of Horticulture (Todd vol. 1, ch. LXII).
• The main entrance's approach wall was a 20-ft hedge of mesembryanthemum 1,150 ft long, grown from 8,700 flat boxes spiked onto a timber frame, rising into arches at the Scott Street gate (Todd vol. 1, ch. LXII).
• The Official Guide reports 200,000 yellow pansies in the South Gardens.
• Cluster standards carrying up to 21 glass globes lit the gardens, one of the few places the exposition used direct lighting. The globes, first white, were lacquered to travertine color (Todd vol. 2, ch. LXIII).
• A band stand was placed near the Service Building at the east end, and the Musical Concourse at the far west end of the Avenue of Palms (Todd; Official Guide).

Afterward

Cleared with the rest of the grounds in 1916–17. The land was restored to its owners and built over as the Marina District (Todd vol. 5; Wikipedia).

Sources

• Official Guide of the PPIE (1915), Courts and Gardens
• Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 2, chs. LVI, LXI–LXIII
• Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 1, ch. LXII (Gardens at Command)
• Barry, The City of Domes (1915), ch. III (In the South Gardens)