What do Robert Louis Stevenson, Sally Rand’s Nude Ranch, monkeys racing tiny automobiles, Diego Rivera, and Indiana Jones, all have in common?
The answer is that they are all connected to the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition, which opened on February 18, 1939 on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay. The start of that event was marked with a 3-cent stamp, also issued on February 18, 1939, that pictures the “Tower of the Sun,” a 400-foot-high tower at the center of the exposition’s grounds that was designed by Arthur T. Brown, a well-known architect, who, among other things, also designed San Francisco City Hall, Coit Tower, Stanford’s Hoover Library, and the ICC and Labor Department buildings in Washington, DC.
Initially planned as a celebration of the city’s two recently completed bridges – the Golden Gate Bridge and the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge – the exposition was billed as a “Pageant of the Pacific” that would showcase the nations bordering that ocean. The theme was physically symbolized not only by the tower (which was later torn down), but also by an 80-foot statue of Pacifica, goddess of the Pacific ocean; and what one writer called “a strange landscape of ziggurats, Sinophilic villages, English gardens, and carnival sideshows.”
The fair was held on “Treasure Island,” a newly created 400-acre island (named after Stevenson’s book) that was built on the shoals near Yerba Buena Island between San Francisco and Oakland. Much of that work was funded by the federal Works Progress Administration and the new island – which could be accessed from the new Bay Bridge—was supposed to become a new Bay Area airport after the fair closed.
The fair included both highbrow offerings and carnival-like entertainment. In 1939, the “highbrow” offerings included an exhibition of art borrowed from the great museums of Europe that supposedly was the finest collection ever displayed in the Western Hemisphere. In 1940, the fair, which had lost money, included “Art in Action,” which featured a dozens of artists working in a building slated to become an airplane hangar. “Here,” wrote Arthur Frankenstein in the New York Times, “the visitor is privileged to observe a kind of twenty-ring circus of art…On the floor, in a series of little ateliers, sculptors, painters, lithographers, etchers, ceramicists, weavers and whatnot are at work under the direct observation of the public.”
The 68 artists who worked at some point in this exhibit included muralist Diego Rivera who was working on his “Pan American Unity,” mural which required ten steel-framed panels that together were 74 feet wide and 22 feet high. The mural, which he finished after the exposition had closed, is now in the lobby of a theater owned by the City College of San Francisco.
The fair’s popular attractions were clustered in the 40-acre “Gayway” whose features included 82 little people in cowboy costumes in a Western town and an automobile racetrack for monkeys. Its most popular attraction, however, was Sally Rand’s Nude Ranch” where, Gary Kamyla wrote in 2013, “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.”
War was on the horizon when the exposition closed in September 1940, according to Herb Caen, the great San Francisco Chronicle columnist who wrote: “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.”
Because of the war, the proposed airport was never built (and the site would have been too small for a modern airport). Rather, the Navy took over the site which, along with Yerba Buena island, became the strategic headquarters and processing center for the Western Naval Fleet during World War II At its peak, over 12,000 men a day received their Pacific area assignments at Treasure Island. Until the mid 1990s, the island also housed training facilities where sailors learned electronics and other skills. It apparently was also used to clean boats thought to be exposed to nuclear-weapons testing in the Pacific after World War II.
In the late 1980s, two of the hangers on the site were used as sound stages for several films and television shows including “The Matrix,” “Rent,” and “The Pursuit of Happyness.” Settings on the island have also been used in a host of films including “The Caine Mutiny,” “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” “Patch Adams,” and “The Parent Trap.”
In 1996, as a part of the wave of base closings in the 1990s, the naval facilities on the island were closed. But before the island could be turned to other uses, the Navy had to start cleaning up significant contamination, including some radioactive materials left over from the ship-cleaning days.
In the early 2000s, the Navy, which was still decontaminating the land, sold the island back to San Francisco for $108 million. The city spent several years developing plans for the site. In 2011, its Board of Supervisors approved a $1.5 billion plan that called for creating a new neighborhood that would be home to about 20,000 people in about 8,000 new residences (about quarter of them affordable). Plans also called for about 550,000 square feet of retail and commercial space, about 300 hotel rooms and almost 300 acres of new parkland. That work is underway: ground was broken for the first affordable housing development last September.
The exposition’s official guidebook’s had a section that starts: “Treasure Island’s beautiful courts and gardens are filled with flowers, foliage, sculpture, bas-relief, and murals. This [section] answers your question, ‘I wonder what that is?'” That may have been their aspiration but, I’m still trying to make sense of the story of Treasure Island and the exposition it housed.
Be safe, stay well, fight for justice, and work for peace.