The Exposition City San Francisco.

Description

A remarkable find, this is a rare original c. 1913 North American Press Association ‘Exposition City’ bird’s-eye view of San Francisco produced in anticipation of the upcoming Panama-Pacific International Exposition. It is in very good condition, complete with its original booklet.

The view is oriented towards the west, with the Ferry Building in the foreground and Market St. running diagonally towards the top-left. Seemingly every building in the city is illustrated in an oblique bird’s-eye view, demonstrating the city’s remarkable renaissance following the devastating 1906 earthquake and fire. The grounds of the upcoming Exposition are highlighted at right. However, as the Exposition was still many months from opening, many of these buildings were still in the planning stage; for instance, the distinctive rotunda of the Palace of Fine Arts is not present here. In addition to streets, many businesses, public institutions, piers, hotels, parks, and other features are labeled throughout. 

Planning the Panama-Pacific International Exposition 

The early planning of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE) was a monumental feat of engineering and urban transformation. Before any structures could rise, San Francisco had to literally create the ground on which they would stand. The chosen site was largely a swampy tidal marsh that even the Exposition’s own planners had doubts about in the early stages of planning. To stabilize the area, engineers undertook a massive landfill project, pumping silt and sand from the bottom of the San Francisco Bay into the lagoons to create 635 acres of usable land.

Once the ground was secured, a “Commission of Architects,” featuring luminaries such as Bernard Maybeck and the firm McKim, Mead & White, devised a layout that broke from the traditional, scattered pavilion style of previous fairs. Instead, they designed a highly integrated expo grounds composed of interconnected courts and great palaces. The architectural aesthetic was a lush blend of Beaux-Arts and “California Renaissance” styles, characterized by the use of a temporary plaster-and-fiber mixture to give the buildings an aged, Mediterranean feel. 

Census

This view was prepared by the North American Press Association in 1912 and published as a supplement to the San Francisco Standard Guide. It was printed in two editions, with two states of the second edition, all of which are rare. The present view is the first state of the second edition, published c. 1913. The still-attached cover indicates its provenance in the collections of the Otis Library in Norwich, Connecticut, before it was deaccessioned and acquired by a private collector, from whom we acquired it.  

The second edition (Rumsey 10066.000) can be distinguished from the first edition (Rumsey 10015.000) by several features, including the inclusion of business names at the bottom-left and the road leading up to the summit of Mt. Tamalpais at the top-right. The second state of the second edition is noted as printed by Traung alone, rather than Pingree-Traung, and was likely published in 1914. Aside from the folding format for the San Francisco Standard Guide seen here, at least one example was printed on thicker paper and backed on linen as a wall map. The view was then reprinted in 1968 in a reduced format by the First Savings and Loan Association and the San Francisco Society of California Pioneers Library (Rumsey 10016.000), which is the format in which one usually sees it. Original, large-format examples published between 1912 and c. 1914 in any printing are very rare to the market and are only recorded among the holdings of ten institutions in the OCLC.