Grab Bag #024
The Reemergence of Pacifica
My friend David Gallagher had a Kodachrome summer. First, he processed a cabinet of amazing 1960s slides, worked with San Francisco Chronicle reporter Peter Hartlaub to identify the photographer, and got himself on television a few times before donating the collection to the San Francisco Public Library. (I will note that San Francisco Story was a tad ahead of all the mainstream press)
Then he discovered that the work of his own uncle was pretty darned professional when relatives gave him a dozen carousels of slides ranging from the 1930s to the late 1960s, covering scenes from Australia, Cambodia, and, what got us both excited, San Francisco.
David’s been steadily scanning and uploading these images to his personal local history site, SFMemory.org, and just a week or so ago put up a collection of his uncle’s amazing views of the Treasure Island fair of 1939–1940.
San Francisco hosted three large fairs in just 46 years: the 1894 Midwinter Fair, the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition, and the 1939-1940 Golden Gate International Exposition (GGIE) on Treasure Island. They all served similar goals: to boost business, advertise the city, and provide some fun.
SF History folks have a tendency to rank the fairs, as if they were in competition. The Panama-Pacific usually wins because of its scale, its cohesive design, and the ongoing goodwill the beautiful Palace of Fine Arts brings as a time-spanning ambassador. But I have a bit more affection for the Midwinter Fair and GGIE because the hokey and somewhat seedy elements are more prominent.
David’s uncle, Renald Rosewood, may have taken lots of slides of his wife, friends, and sundry fair-goers, but what he picked for his curated presentation carousel featured his skill as a photographer using a new exciting format: Kodachrome. His f-stops, shutter speeds, dates and times were all notated on the slides. We have carefully composed shots of the GGIE as a set, a stage for an exotic Hollywood movie, views ready for a glossy pamphlet, souvenir postcard, or coffee table book.
After apparently living in a desaturated world of gray and sepia, Kodachrome made everyone Dorothy stepping into Oz after the twister.
Newcomers, and a lot of longtime locals, may be unaware that Treasure Island was created in the specifically for the Golden Gate International Exposition. The pancake-flat 400 acres of dumped rock, sand, and topsoil were intended to serve as San Francisco’s airport when the exposition closed. (This plan was not, as the buzzword goes today, “scalable.” Can you imagine a 747 touching down there today?)
With a theme of “Pageant of the Pacific,” the fair celebrated the opening of the Golden Gate and Bay bridges, and had its own mythology. An eighty-foot-high goddess of the ocean and a “Tower of the Sun” stood over a strange landscape of ziggurats, Sinophilic villages, English gardens, and carnival sideshows.
In black and white, with the names of explorers and conquistadors emblazoned on high walls around her, the goddess “Pacifica” is a guardian to some great tomb.
But the colossal walls and columns lose their chill and gain some hoke when you see them splashed in indigo and gold.
The GGIE was a testament to the imaginations of architects George Kelham, Arthur Brown Jr., William Merchant, Ernest Weihe, Louis Hobart, and Timothy Pflueger. Renald Rosewood's work (and Kodachrome) allows us to also celebrate the genius of the GGIE’s color director Jesse Stanton and lighting designer A. F. Dickerson. In grayscale, the exposition can come off as a marble city of the past; in color, the world sparks with life, theater, and a full spectrum of moods, desires, and inspiration.
Elephant train
One of David’s uncle’s shots is of the GGIE’s people mover, the elephant train (really trailers hooked up to a motorized car):
I have heard these trains were used at Ocean Beach after the fair ended, but the ones I remember well were at the zoo, with the front cars fitted out with big fiberglass elephant faces.
Here are some details on the GGIE train route, pulled from a pamphlet I scanned years ago:
On Leave from Treasure Island
My grandfather, Eugene Slinkey, and his cousin, Art Markstrom, were both in the U.S. Navy during World War II. Here they are looking slick with my grandmother:
Among Art’s effects was a small pamphlet dating from 1945 created as a guide for the thousands of sailors who passed through Treasure Island. It was written by Yeoman 1st class Pedley and featured cartoons by Yeoman 3rd class Jack MacDonald. Here’s the cover:
Some of the advice inside gives a good picture of San Francisco when it was a Navy town and what was determined interesting for men on liberty, who were required not to stray far:
“Do not attempt to cover all the spots withing the fifty-mile radius in one night of liberty. The following places are worth seeing during your stay on Treasure Island:
Chinatown (Grant and Bush Streets)
International Settlement (Pacific Street)
Stage-Door Canteen (Mason and Market Streets)
Fleishhacker’s Swimming Pool and Zoological Gardens (L car)
Golden Gate Park (Cars 5, 7, and 20 run parallel with the park)
Fisherman’s Wharf (Embarcadero via bus or cable car)
Ferry Building (Foot of Market Street)
Seal’s Stadium, Home of Frisco’s Baseball Nine (16th and Bryant Car 25)
Kezar Stadium (Golden Gate Park, Cars 5, 7, 20)
Balboa Park (Ocean Avenue)
Cliff House and Seal Rocks (Cars 5, 7, 1, 2, B).”
I’m not sure how exciting men returning from the Pacific Theater would find Balboa Park, but nice to see it as an option. And if you do get to time-travel, you now know which streetcar routes to take.
Don’t Come to San Francisco Now
Writing about World War II and the attractions of San Francisco made me remember this full-page ad from the war era, published in the Saturday Evening Post (if my memory is correct):
It’s all right everybody: we’d love to have you now. Everything promised in the ad is still here, except maybe most of the sidewalk flower stands, which used to be a real thing here.
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