Panama-Pacific International Exposition

On the globe

See full fair gallery (16)

Dates: 20 Feb – 4 Dec 1915
Site: Today's Marina District
Declared purpose: A fair for the Panama Canal's opening and San Francisco's comeback after the 1906 earthquake and fire.
Fate: The Palace of Fine Arts survives, rebuilt in concrete in the 1960s. The Tower of Jewels came down in 1916.
Architect of record: Bernard Maybeck, architect: about 51 when credited (1913, born 1862). Build time on record: about 2 years (1913–15), rebuilt in concrete in the 1960s.All architects of record →

Hidden history

Found, Not Built

Nine years after the 1906 earthquake and fire, San Francisco filled the bay shore with palaces and a 435-foot tower covered in glass jewels. Then it took almost all of it down.

The Tower of Jewels
Researchers on X point to the tower's crown and ask whether this was an older structure from an earlier world, dismantled in 1916.
Earthquake, fire, then palaces
A city 'rebuilding' from disaster put up one of the grandest fairs ever. Fire, then a fair, then demolition is a sequence that comes up again and again.
The palace the city wouldn't lose
The Palace of Fine Arts was saved by public demand and later recast in concrete. Was it copied, or preserved?

Questions worth asking

Where were the workers and materials coming from in a city still clearing rubble?
Why put 100,000 glass jewels on a tower and then dismantle it?
What's under the Marina fill?