Art: Pacific Pageant

The two biggest shows in the land of the free this year will be at Flushing, L. I. and on San Francisco Bay. To stage them businessmen have dug down for millions of dollars, politicians have played their cards, engineers have sweated, architects have dreamed, press agents have run wild, artists have cried aloud. Located smack in the centres of the two greatest metropolitan areas in the U. .S., each will choke its already surfeited neighborhood with milling millions of citizens out for a good time. To each will come travelers seeking knowledge of the world and its wonders. So runs the half-meretricious, half-genuine promise of World's Fairs.

In the East this converging flood of population is still four months away, but San Francisco has only six weeks before the great visitation begins.* Last week curious and critical San Franciscans took a last look around their Exposition's "Treasure Island," probably about to be closed to visitors while 3,000 workmen go on double shift to polish it off for opening day.

Ocean City. The reclaimers of Flushing dump could be reasonably sure that any exposition erected there would be a delightful improvement on the scene, but San Francisco's exposition builders were far from such a certainty. For the city and harbor of San Francisco constitute one of the great urban beauties of North America. San Francisco Bay is not only vast—48 miles long, embracing 450 square miles of roadstead—but magnificently visible, cupped by the steeply carved mountains of the coast range. San Francisco rises in clean, pale tiers of buildings on the hilly peninsula between this shining water and the Pacific Ocean.

The site chosen for the "Golden Gate International Exposition" placed it in isolated contrast to these surroundings, had a decisive influence on its builders. San Francisco needed an airport before it needed a Fair, and the best place for an airport was determined as early as 1931 by the Junior Chamber of Commerce. Credit for putting two & two together is given to Air-enthusiast Henry Eickhoff Jr., who began thumping in 1933 for an exposition along with the airport, on the ground that each would help build the other. Three years more and a fleet of dredges appeared off the wooded hump of Yerba Buena Island between San Francisco and Oakland and began pumping black sand from the Bay bottom, slopping it over Yerba Buena shoals. With the help of Army engineers, WPA labor and a grant of $6,250,000 from the Federal Government, a mile-long island was sucked from the Bay to serve as San Francisco's fairground in 1939 and its airport forever after.

Pleasuredom. Local precedent for the Fair builders was San Francisco's Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915, a glittering tour de jorce by the smartest Beaux-Arts architects of the day. Held to celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal. it appropriately linked East Coast and West Coast on its board of architects. Tenderly remembered in San Francisco, the Panama-Pacific Exposition had no influence for the good on U. S. architecture.