The '39 world's fair: an island of joyous excess
Updated 8:15 am, Saturday, August 17, 2013
For most commuters crossing the Bay Bridge, Treasure Island is just an oddly flat strip of land pancaked on the bay, incongruously joined to Yerba Buena Island and serving no discernible function.
But Treasure Island has a fascinating story. It is both an engineering marvel and the site of one of the oddest, most beloved and fantastic creations in the city's history - the Golden Gate International Exposition of 1939, San Francisco's third and last World's Fair.
Treasure Island was built to celebrate the opening of the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge, both completed during the depth of the Depression, and to show the world that San Francisco was vibrant enough to create a glittering fairyland on a man-made island 2 miles out in the bay.
As Richard Reinhardt notes in "Treasure Island: San Francisco's Exposition Years," civic boosters and Chamber of Commerce pooh-bahs spent months trying to pick a site for the fair. Golden Gate Park, China Basin, Candlestick Point and Lake Merced were all considered and rejected.
Backers then turned their attention to a 735-acre reef just north of Yerba Buena Island, which tests showed could support an artificial island. A prominent businessman named Leland Cutler championed the site, but several members of the Board of Supervisors argued that the fair should be held on the mainland.
The 13-hour debate featured the deathless assertion by Supervisor James McSheehy about Cutler: "We all love him, but he don't know the rump of the common people like I do!"
When probed, the rump of the common people turned out to support building the island, but didn't want to issue bonds to pay for it. But Harry Hopkins, head of the federal Works Project Administration, which was created to provide employment during the Depression, committed the WPA to paying for most construction costs for an international airport at the site, which could first be used for the fair.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers undertook the job in 1936, which boosters grandiosely claimed would result in the largest man-made island on Earth. That was an exaggeration, but the construction of Treasure Island (named after the novel by Robert Louis Stevenson, who lived on Bush Street for a time) was nonetheless an impressive feat.
The Army Corps dumped 287,000 tons of boulders on the reef, surrounded it with a 3-mile-long seawall, and filled the resulting lagoon with 25 million cubic yards of mud and sand.
The finished island was not entirely stable: Its north end, built on mud, was expected to slowly sink. No buildings were erected on this part of the island, which became a 12,000-car parking lot for the fair. The lot is gone; the island is still sinking.
The fair opened Feb. 18, 1939, after several years of loud, irrational hoopla designed to bring paying customers through the turnstiles. The Treasure Island "Theme Girl," a leggy, permanently smiling young lady named Zoe Dell Lantis, traveled around the country in a risque pirate costume, posing with Indian chiefs, driving bulldozers and leaping across crevasses.
The fair was a melange of wild architectural creations, corny historical pageants, paeans to international goodwill, technological innovations and early exercises in corporate branding, with plenty of good old-fashioned amusement-park fun and games thrown in.
One section, known as the Gayway ("Forty Acres of Fun"), featured such peculiar attractions as 82 little people in cowboy costumes in a Western town, an automobile racetrack for monkeys, and, most memorably, Sally Rand's Nude Ranch, where for a quarter spectators could peek through glass panels as 20 "cowgirls" wearing only G-strings and boots tossed horseshoes, swung lariats and played badminton.
This remarkably lubricious show packed in 65,000 people during the fair's first week. But most of the shows on the Gayway were not so successful: About two-thirds of them went broke.
The fair also featured more highbrow offerings, including a $40 million art exhibition borrowed from the great museums of Europe, which was acclaimed as the finest collection ever displayed in the Western Hemisphere. When, after six months, receipts from the art exhibit finally exceeded those of Sally Rand's Nude Ranch, the exposition trumpeted the fact in a press release.
In an early, literal example of performance art, the Mexican artist Diego Rivera worked on a mural as spectators watched him and other artists from a distance. The mural is now in the lobby of a theater at City College of San Francisco's Ocean Avenue campus.
Mix of themes
Architecturally and visually, the fair was weirdly eclectic. The official architectural theme was "Pacific Basin," inspired by Mayan, Incan, Malayan and Cambodian sources, but no single style united the fair's buildings. The signature structure on the island, the 400-foot-high Tower of the Sun, looked like an Italian campanile, while the imposing wall built to block the westerly winds vaguely recalled Angkor Wat.
In fact, with its enormous, ephemeral, never-never-land buildings illuminated by 10,000 brilliant lights, the fair resembled nothing so much as a later generation's monument to hallucinatory visual excess - Burning Man.
Like many world's fairs, San Francisco's turned out to be a financial bust. Seventeen million people visited it during its two years, but the $7.8 million fair still lost money. But those who visited it never forgot it.
Built as World War II approached - a photo of the 1936 groundbreaking shows the flags of many nations, the most prominent of which is a swastika - the World's Fair on Treasure Island was a last moment of innocence before the world plunged into darkness. The international airport was never built there; the Navy had greater need of the island.
Chronicle columnist Herb Caen, who visited the fair as a young reporter, later recalled, "Then came the night the lights went down forever at the 1940 Fair on Treasure Island, and we knew there was nothing left to do but wait for our war to come along and get us - for what was left of our youth died then and there, out in the black bay."
Last week's trivia question was: In 1936, the eminent historian Herbert Bolton was snookered by a fake "plate of brasse" supposedly left by Sir Francis Drake. Name one theory about who perpetrated the fraud and why.
Answer: It has been suggested that Bolton's students executed the hoax, but were too embarrassed to admit it after their esteemed professor was taken in.
This week's trivia question: What unusual structures became death traps during the great San Francisco fire of 1850?
Every corner in San Francisco has an astonishing story to tell. Every Saturday, Gary Kamiya's "Portals of the Past" will tell one of those lost stories, using a specific location to illuminate San Francisco's extraordinary history - from the days when giant mammoths wandered through what is now North Beach, to the Gold Rush delirium, the dot-com madness and beyond.
Gary Kamiya is a freelance writer and Bay Area native. His book, "Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco," has just been published by Bloomsbury. E-mail: firstname.lastname@example.org